If you want to ban books that make children uncomfortable, start with the Bible | opinion
The electoral race for Virginia’s Governor is over. The Trump-attracting/repulsing Republican won. The seething cauldron of racial fears of an historically racist state spilled over as divisive tensions in our nation mount.
I’m a native Virginian. When I was a teen in the 1950s — that era to which so many Republicans in fits of fantasy want to return — Jim Crow laws were in full effect. The gas station where my father filled the tank of our family station wagon had two drinking fountains — one shiny stainless steel one inside labeled “White’s Only”, the other out back, a rust-stained porcelain for “Colored”. I know because in defiance I drank at that scruffy porcelain sink. So, yes, I’m “white,” and I am well aware of my white privilege — you see, at least I had the freedom of choice, and I knew it back then. And now white parents all over the country are protesting that their children should have to learn history and study literature whose truths glower from the mirror of that privilege.
Today, more than sixty years after my water fountain rebellion, Virginians rose up in protest over the education of their children. One mother of a teen who was a student in Advanced Placement English roused a whole movement based on the fact that her son was “uncomfortable” reading the assigned Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Toni Morrison, Beloved. I have read Beloved, about the chilling aftermath of horrific conditions under slavery. The fact that slavery as an institution supported the white minority’s economy and plantation wealth in the South ought to make every one of us uncomfortable.
And if we begin banning books in public schools that make students uncomfortable, we ought to begin with the Holy Bible. The stories in the Old Testament of the treatment of Jewish slaves in Egypt, or the rampant slaughter of peoples whose beliefs were heretical to Judaism, should make you uncomfortable.
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More than that, the entire New Testament relates the wisdom teachings of a man whose whole brief life was one of rebellion against state-sanctioned violence, and the divisiveness of tribalism that pitted neighbor against neighbor.
If the radical nature of the teachings of Jesus —“love your neighbor as yourself,” or even more, “love your enemies,” don’t make you uncomfortable, you are not holding them in your heart and truly letting your life be guided by them. If the story of the Good Samaritan doesn’t make you uncomfortable, then you would not walk around a homeless man living on the sidewalk, or stay safely in your home when an unarmed man is being beaten by policemen. If reading of Jesus’ hours in the Garden of Gethsemene or the torture of his 39 lashes and crucifixion don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re not getting the message. The whole point is, Jesus wanted his followers to be uncomfortable! And if your religion is not one that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable,” then it is not serving you.
Our moral discomfort as human beings is directly related to the development of our conscience. Parents ought to consider making their children uncomfortable by presenting new and challenging ideas to them as part of their moral obligation as parents. It has been children whose hearts have broken over the plight of the homeless in their communities who have led adults to provide blankets and food for them.
Children’s fairy tales and Disney movies make children uncomfortable — consider the wicked stepmother in Snow White whose insane vanity led her to arrange for the death of her beautiful step-daughter. How many thousands of children were frightened out of their wits by the witchy woman with the poisoned apple? Or The Ugly Duckling, in which an abused, lonely, cygnet believes he’s a misfit because of his ugliness, only to discover when he has spent a winter in frozen, miserable isolation that he emerges with spring into the transformation of his inherent swan elegance — this is a story of inner spiritual progress. Children’s stories have always been used through feelings of fear and discomfort to teach moral lessons. Children should be made to feel uncomfortable with animal cruelty — Dumbo, or inequity in treatment of siblings — Cinderella, or the value of grounding in family and relationship — Wizard of Oz.
And as children mature, so should their perspectives broaden. The Diary of Anne Frank has been used for generations in schools to teach profound lessons in not only recent history, but also the moral courage and inner spiritual life of a young Jewish woman persecuted by the Nazis. It is our very discomfort with the realities of Anne’s life and a world in which people can be persuaded to exterminate those considered the Other, that compel us to seek a better world, one in which no one is excluded or persecuted because of her faith, her ethnicity, or her nationality.
We need to make sure that our school libraries and the curricula of our classrooms include books that raise the consciousness and the consciences of our youth. And the only avenue to real growth, the development of a moral compass and the spiritual quality of compassion—which Jesus, the Buddha, and countless saints of all persuasions possessed in abundance—is through the teaching of uncomfortable truths. That is what makes both discomfort and education sacred.
The Rev. Ellen Dionna lives in Dover.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Education should make you and your children uncomfortable | opinion
